Lyrical dialogue, great landscapes, unpalatable violence and great flashes of his trademark directorial brio collectively deliver another ‘horrible history’ production for adults.

Austrian star Christoph Waltz is the right mixture of little known persona / brilliant actor as a dentist called Dr King Schultz.

You can’t take your eyes off him for a minute as the German-born bounty hunter mentors former slave Django’s bid to rescue wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from nasty Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Waltz, 56, rightly won the best supporting actor Oscar in 2010 for playing Col Hans Landa in Tarantino’s last movie, Inglourious Basterds.

Now Waltz has earned a second nod, though given the sheer length of time he’s on screen in a 165-minute film suggests he’s in the wrong category, especially when Anthony Hopkins was 1992’s ‘best actor’ after barely 16 minutes on screen in The Silence of the Lambs.

Always finding a new trick to stay alive, Waltz anchors this film brilliantly so that Jamie Foxx as Django and the rest of the all-star cast can fit into Tarantino’s latest heady mix of styles.

Foxx won a best actor Oscar for Ray in 2005, but since then a succession of poor film choices means that he hasn’t covered himself in the glory that his talent deserves.

Here, there are wonderful hints that he’s playing a black Clint Eastwood in a film which feels irresistibly like Roots crossed with the best spaghetti westerns.

Schultz and Django infiltrate Candie’s plantation where slaves are encouraged to fight each other – but where house slave Stephen (a scarcely-recognisable Samuel L Jackson) becomes suspicious.

The whole production is kept beautifully oiled with superb cinematography by Robert Richardson, now with an eighth Oscar-nomination including previous wins for JFK (1992), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2012).

One scene featuring an unseen man being shot off his horse is poetry in motion, but this wouldn’t be a Tarantino film without its musical references, too.

They are at once instantly familiar yet perfectly fresh, wholesomely boisterous and awkwardly idiosyncratic.

And always so entertaining they often put a smile on your face – if only because you can imagine the sheer pleasure that Tarantino will have had digging them out.

Then there’s his ability to mix extreme violence with comic book humour (DiCaprio’s amazing skull scene has both) and vogue for bringing back old, familiar faces.

Take your pick from Miami Vice star Don Johnson as ‘Big Daddy’ to Bruce Dern (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They / Hang ‘Em High and The Great Gatsby) and Franco Nero, John Huston’s blue-eyed boy who later led Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 western, Django.

An all-too-rare historical exploration of a nation which has always embraced the right to shoot, Django Unchained is an intriguing study of the colliding forces which forged the US.

Despite the number of vicious killings – including one knee-jerking episode with a hammer – some viewers might find the 100 uses of the N-word more offensive.

Oscar-nominated for script, look out for Tarantino the ‘actor’ late on as a ‘LeQuint Dickey Mining Co. Employee’.